


Cover your tracks

by gwendee



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crack Treated Seriously, Dysfunctional Family, Family Dynamics, Fluff and Crack, Humor, M/M, Mild Angst, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Out of Character, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:55:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29512821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendee/pseuds/gwendee
Summary: The moral of this story is that if you’re going to move to a new country and start a new life all over again, don’t make it a point to appear on the news so that your old life can catch up to you.Or: Gakushuu meets the people on the paternal branch of his family tree.
Relationships: Asano Gakuhou & Asano Gakushuu, Asano Gakuhou & Original Character(s)
Comments: 25
Kudos: 93





	Cover your tracks

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is absolute trash and I hate myself for it
> 
> It's been so long since I posted something substantial! I don't think this counts. I almost had something for the GakuRen Week ready, but by god it took got out of hand that honestly I don't think I would finish writing it anytime soon... but I plan to work on it well! I'm excited for it, but I don't know if I can pull it off... it's a fantasy type of premise but the plot got way too convoluted for me to handle.
> 
> And I still do have my many many WIPs upcoming which I really want to work on HAHA but my single braincell is just bouncing around the panasonic TV screen.
> 
> And this fic idea itself... I can't even justify it. Oh my god  
> I faintly remember having this discussion before: what if Gakuhou secretly had a normal ass name and he just changed his name to fuckign GAKUHOU and named his kid GAKUSHUU like man. why would you do this?   
> Gakuhou is 100% one of those white people, he named his son "Study" which is way worse than "Keightleighyln". Or maybe not way worse, but like, an equal level of worse.

**What is going on lmao**

The ancestry of the Asano's are shrouded in mystery, and Gakushuu's family history is something he's tried - and failed - to uncover. He's not entirely sure he can't say his father was spawned on Earth straight from Satan himself - the evidence, or lack thereof, strongly supports that hypothesis. 

His mother is a sweet Japanese woman who came into existence by equally humble and demure people, who for some reason seem to be endeared by their devilish son-in-law, enough to wrap their daughter in pretty cloth and send her off to be married. Gakushuu loves his grandparents - despite their clearly flawed judgements - who dote on him dearly, sending him cute little nothings from the corners of the world they're waddling through as part of the extravagant dowry their son-in-law had bestowed upon them in exchange for whisking their daughter into the life of the upper class. 

Gakushuu keeps an album of the postcards and little pictures they snail-mail him. The last one he got was from Rio de Janeiro, two brightly colored macaws perched on the hats on his little grandparents' heads. 

He hasn't seen them in years, though, since they've packed up and left Japan ten odd years ago after their only daughter passed. He'd fly out to see them, but his father was a workaholic and also viciously protective, not that he'd ever admit it; not that you could tell, either, with however much he seems to give Gakushuu free reign in his exploits. But he was one overbearing dad, who lets Gakushuu's leash only as long as he thinks he can still yank it, and luckily for Gakushuu his father loves overestimating the extent of his surveillance, which means Gakushuu has been gaming the system for  _ years _ .

He digresses. Where was he? The maternal side of his extended family were in South America, and his paternal relatives... didn't exist. As far as Gakushuu knew, his father had no preceding lineage to trace, which as far as the way human reproduction works, was impossible. He couldn't really have popped into existence from nothing, right? Gakushuu knew he had a whole hidden side of the family tree somewhere and no way to find out.

"I've looked into every Asano there has ever existed in Japan," Gakushuu says emphatically, slamming his hands on the table. "None of them. None of them fit."

"What do you mean by fit?" Sakakibara says, between the cookies in his mouth.

Gakushuu points to his hair, and then his eyes. "My crazy ass genetics," he says. It should be obvious. 

"Maybe you're adopted," Koyama says, and then stuffs another cookie into his mouth.

"I look exactly like that man," Gakushuu says.

"Well, maybe he's adopted," Karma points out.

"Hm," Gakushuu says. "Shit." That opens up a new plethora of possibilities in which his birth grandparents may not be named Asano. It seems like the only possible solution is to now look into every single family in Japan.

"Don't think too much about it," Karma says. 

"If you find out, you'll find out," Araki says. There have never been truer words of wisdom. 

"Eat some cookies," Seo says.

"You people are heathens," Gakushuu says. He eats the cookies, because his friends have dragged him out of the house to feed him, and they’re very good at making sure Gakushuu gets fed.

Gakushuu shelves the line of thought for now, because there's nothing he could do about it. His father is a man of secrets, many of which Gakushuu had to piece together with newspapers clippings and photo albums from the attic. 

He only gets this antsy and preoccupied with his father’s life once every year when it’s nearing his mother’s birthday, mostly as a distraction. He spends the week leading up to it sulkier than usual and running around so he can pass out every night from sheer exhaustion, the actual day sitting across his father in the living room as they both mutually ignore each other in companionable sulky silence, and he mostly spends the following week sulking even more.

The moral of this story is that Gakushuu sulks a lot.

Well, no. Actually the moral of this story is that if you’re going to move to a new country and start a new life all over again, don’t make it a point to appear on the news so that your old life can catch up to you, but Gakushuu hasn’t gotten to that part of the story yet, so the current moral of this story is that Gakushuu sulks a lot, and you can get a lot done when you’re sulking if you learn to reframe your perception of productivity. During sulk weeks, for example, being productive is being able to get out of bed and sit in the living room to glare at his dad, and Gakushuu is very very productive during sulk weeks.

It’s two weeks post sulk week, and Gakushuu is finally getting back into the swing of things. He’s gotten a little - ahem - lax in his physical regime so he’s doing extra laps to make up for it, so it’s pretty late out when he finally finishes his post-workout shower in the school locker room. He thinks of picking up some groceries but he doesn’t remember how much milk he has left in the fridge, did he have half a carton left, or did he finish it yesterday? He did want to make some milk tea later on, but he’d been subsisting off cereal for the past week…

He calls Karma. “Should I get milk?”

“What? No,” Karma says, and sounds appalled. “You’ve been eating cereal for the past week.”

“But I want milk tea.”

“Just go buy ready made Milk Tea like the rest of us, you weirdo,” Karma says. He hangs up.

Almost immediately, his phone rings. It’s Ren.

“Stop buying milk,” Ren says in lieu of a hello when Gakushuu picks up.

“Are you with Karma right now?” Gakushuu says.

“Uh, yeah,” Ren says. “Completely unrelated question to what we’re doing, what do you want for your birthday?”

“Milk tea,” Gakushuu says.

“Seriously?” Ren says, mostly to himself, then a more distant “guys, he says he wants milk tea,” and then a “hey!”, then the brief sounds of a scuffle.

“Listen,” someone says, and oh, it’s Karma again. “You’re fucking lactose intolerant. Stop buying milk.” He hangs up.

Gakushuu frowns at his phone. “Whatever,” he says quietly to himself, and dumps a carton of milk into his basket anyways. As if on cue, he gets a text from Karma, which tactfully reads “Stop it!!!” Gakushuu ignores it. He buys more fresh food because he’d probably be cooking healthy for a bit until he feels less gross, and then he steps outside the supermarket only to have his attention drawn to a discount poster, and he deliberates going back inside for sale eggs.

And then someone taps him on the shoulder. 

Gakushuu turns around, his default direction-giving smile on his face, but whatever words die on his tongue as he takes in the man who had approached him. The man, similarly, has a stunned look on his face, and it’s most likely attributed to the fact that they’re both staring at their doppelgangers.

“Um,” Gakushuu says, “hi?”

"Hi," the man says in english, smiling a little awkwardly with his hands at his sides, then falters. He looks foreign. 

“I can speak english,” Gakushuu says, in english.

“Oh, great,” the man says, smiling in relief. “Uh, this is going to sound very weird.”

What could possibly be weirder than this? This man who Gakushuu has never seen before in his life, has dusty blond hair and familiar angled violet eyes, although he certainly looks like he’d had better sleep than Gakushuu in the past month. There’s no mistaking the uncanny resemblance, however, somehow present despite his nationality - his face and accent is American. Gakushuu discreetly checks his phone again, but the date and time remains the same and there’s no message notification about any oncoming apocalypse.

“Do you…” the man scrunches up his face, like he’s trying to find the right words. “...live here?”

Gakushuu squints at him. “At... the supermarket?”

“No,” the man laughs, “like… here.” He gestures vaguely to nothing.

“The neighborhood?” Gakushuu guesses. He’s not sure if he’s very comfortable sharing his area of residence with a stranger, even if said stranger looks creepily like he does. 

“Um, in Japan,” the man says. Then blinks, like he realized he’s said something stupid.

“I do live in Japan,” Gakushuu says, wondering very much where this conversation was going.

“Uh,” the man says, “this is going to sound weird. Listen, I’m looking for someone.”

Gakushuu waits.

“That someone is… I… I’m sorry, I think my sister can explain this better. Naomi!" The man turns around and hollers. "Naomi, come here!" 

"God, Alex," a woman comes trotting over, a mask of irritation on her face. "Will you stop harassing the locals? This isn’t the movies, you can’t hold a picture out and - oh my god!"

Oh my god indeed. Gakushuu is just as surprised as the woman, who is gaping at him like he's a museum exhibit, because she looks exactly like, well, she looks exactly like his dad. If there was a female version of Gakuhou somewhere else in the world, it looks like Gakushuu has just met her.

The woman - Naomi - turns to the man - Alex, gripping his arm. “He looks just like!-”

“I know!” Alex exclaims, swinging his arm wide, and Gakushuu takes a step back to avoid it. At that movement Alex looks contrite, and Naomi leans into him quickly. “Your uniform! It has that logo on it!”

Gakushuu jumps backwards in shock, holding his groceries up as a shield between them. He's usually more put together than this, and more polite to strangers... but sulk weeks mean that his brain hasn't quite rebooted enough to tackle the processings of normal life which means everything is scary and confusing. 

“I’m sorry, but who are you?!” His exclamation turns several heads.

“Oh, I apologize,” Naomi says, flustered. “That was- that was inappropriate of me.” She exchanges a look with Alex, then turns back to Gakushuu. “You see, we’re looking for someone. Our brother.”

Brother.

_ Brother _ .

“Brother,” Gakushuu says slowly.

Denial is a river in Egypt, and Gakushuu is drowning in it.

“Brother, yes,” Alex nods, pulling out his phone and oh god, oh god. It’s a screencap of - dear fucking god - one of the interviews his dad had to give to convince the world that the infamous moon destroying supercreature of last year had been no threat to the students. Technically, Koro-sensei turned out to be a very nice teacher who stopped the the students from getting killed, but he was also the reason they were killing targets in the first place, and it shouldn’t have been his dad’s problem in the first place, because it was the government’s responsibility for them to handle the kid’s safety, or so the argument goes-

-that’s not the point. 

“Brother?” Gakushuu repeats. He blinks owlishly at the screencap.

“Well, yes,” Alex says, fidgeting. “That’s… the most recent photo of him we could find, uh, on television. We have… less recent photos…?”

“Here,” Naomi says, holding her phone out and oh my god, that’s very unmistakably his dad as a whole ass teenager, in jeans and an Aeropostale T-shirt. Brown hair, violet eyes, a slightly preppier version of the Asano creepy smile, but-

“Brother?!” Gakushuu wails, increasingly distressed.

“Yes!” Alex says. “His name is- well, we call him James, but I suppose he changed his name so you call him something different, the television said his name was A- Ah- I don’t know how to pronounce it, I’m sorry.”

Gakushuu wants to cry. He looks at the two Americans, who are apparently claiming they are his uncle and aunt,  _ holy shit _ , what is his life? Staring at him with so much earnestness no doubt waiting for Gakushuu to drop the bomb, because why else would they have approached him in the first place, if not for his stupid genetics and the fact that he looks like a carbon copy of Gakuhou Asano -  _ or whatever his fucking name is _ \- circa Aeropostale T-shirt year?!

“I call him dad,” Gakushuu says quietly, and the two people - his  _ uncle and aunt, holy shit _ \- start hyperventilating and pulling out more pictures and patting his hair and Gakushuu wants to cry.

Gakushuu doesn’t cry. Instead he does what he does best: put on a brave uncrackable front under stress. He straightens up, gives the two his best I’m-invested-in-your-wellbeing smile and hefts his groceries. “Well then,” he says, “follow me.”

He makes it halfway through his lawn before he’s broken into a sprint, only partially registering the awed compliments of the size of his house when he already has the key in the lock and he’s pushing opening the door. The subject of his torment in the awkwardly silent 10 minute walk is lounging on the couch with his laptop and sipping tea, and he looks up blandly at Gakushuu’s dramatic entrance, a greeting on his lips, but if Gakushuu hears his voice he thinks he’s going to  _ scream _ .

“ _ James?!”  _ He wails, and instantly his dad - the fucking liar - is on his feet, eyes wide. 

“What-”

“You fucking LIAR!” Gakushuu shrieks. He throws the grocery bags - his dad catches them - and pulls at his hair. “Your real name isn’t fucking GAKUHOU. It’s fucking - it’s fucking JAMES. What the FUCK.  _ What the FUCK?! _ ”

“Gakushuu!” His dad says, looking panicked, “where did you-”

“James?!”

“Alex? Naomi? How- is that- what-”

“Oh my  _ god! _ ” Gakushuu shrieks. The three adults turn to stare at him in terrifying synchronization, triplet expressions of shock on their faces. 

“I feel like I’m looking at a funhouse mirror maze!” Gakushuu screams. He’d never thought the truth could be so  _ horrifying _ . 

“Gakushuu-”

“Don’t call me that, oh my  _ god! _ ” Gakushuu shudders. “I don’t even know you anymore! Oh dear god- ow!” 

His dad has cuffed him over the head, looking mortified. He turns towards his  _ siblings, oh god _ . “I am so sorry-”

“You should be!” Gakushuu screams. “You- owWW! I am in DISTRESS! I can’t believe your name is JAMES! I can’t believe you chose the name GAKUHOU of your own damn accord! I can’t believe you  _ named me GAKUSHUU OF YOUR OWN DAMN- _ ”

His father has clamped a hand over his mouth in a poor attempt to shut him up, and Gakushuu does not feel a lick of mercy today, so he sinks his very sharp teeth down on it. Gakuhou pulls back with a grimace and Gakushuu takes his opening to sprint up to his room.

He opens his laptop and immediately types fucking "James" into the search bar, then realizes he has no idea where he goes from there. And as much as he wants to avoid the awkwardness of the family reunion downstairs, he really really  _ really  _ wants to now.

On his hands and knees, he crawls silently to a blind spot at the top of the stairs, peers over the side to see the living room, and settles in gleefully.

"I'm so sorry about him," his dad is saying, but then his voice trails off and the three stare at each other.

"He's a cute kid," Naomi says, smiling. "How old is he?"

"He'd be turning 16 this - next year," Gakuhou says. "His birthday is on new year's." 

"His name is… Ga- ga- sorry, what did you call him?” Alex says.

“Gakushuu. His name is Gakushuu,” his father says. He looks the most awkward Gakushuu has ever seen him, head tilted to the side and hand rubbing his arm.

“Gakushuu,” Alex repeats in soft awe, a terrible anglicized pronunciation of his name.

“Do you have a wife?” Naomi asks. “Are you married?”

“I was,” his father says, stilted, “I… she passed when Gakushuu was five.”

“Oh dear,” Naomi says. “I’m sorry.”

Gakuhou shrugs stiffly. “It’s just been the two of us.” 

“James,” Alex says, stepping forth, and Gakushuu cringes. He doesn’t look away from the absolute train wreck as his father has an equally horrified look on his face and - oh no, oh no, there are feelings now. They’re hugging. Oh my gosh. Naomi’s in the hug too. Very slowly, Gakushuu pulls out his phone and snaps a picture, because he needs photographic evidence to convince himself he’s not going insane.

Wait, so his dad is American?

“It’s been so long since we saw you…” Naomi says, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, “you’re all grown up. You have a kid now, and  _ he’s _ all grown up.”

Wait, who’s older?

“We missed you,” Alex says. “We missed you so much. Mom and Dad missed you.”

Holy shit, Gakushuu’s paternal grandparents.

“They…” Gakuhou looks hesitant.

“They never wanted you to leave,” Naomi’s voice cracks, “we never wanted you to leave. We spent so long searching for you.”

“You were on the news,” Alex blurts, and he pulls out his phone again, most likely to show his father the same picture he showed Gakushuu. “We came straight to Japan. Tokyo. Here, when we saw it.”

Gakushuu presses the video record button.

“I couldn’t…” Gakuhou says, unbearably tense. 

“We were…,” Naomi says, wincing, “I... We should never have-”

“We were wrong,” Alex says. “You’re our baby brother. We missed you.”

Oh my god, Gakushuu’s father was a  _ younger sibling _ . No wonder he was such a stuck-up, entitled, bratty little-

“I know you’re eavesdropping, Gakushuu,” his father calls out.

“And? What are you going to do about it, old man?” Gakushuu snarks back.

“Get down here.”

Gakushuu has half a mind to just run off, but he’s too curious for his own good. He tucks his phone back into his pocket and trudges back down the stairs. Naomi and Alex are looking at him like a specimen in a museum. Gakushuu ignores them, because the novelty and ironic hilarity of the whole situation aside, he is  _ pissed _ . 

“How long were you going to keep this from me?” Gakushuu demands, spreading his arms wide. “Were you even going to tell me at all? Have I not passed enough levels to unlock every little tidbit of your tragic backstory? Do I have to unlock another cutscene where I jump off a bridge?!”

Alex and Naomi should have no clue of the significance, but they immediately grow quiet and take steps back. Gakuhou, on the other hand, grows angry to match his son.

“Watch your mouth, Asano,” he growls, most likely hesitant to really scold him in front of his siblings - which what a sight that must make! And oh,  _ oh _ , Oh!

“It must have been oh so easy for you to forge our  _ wonderfully intimate father-son bond _ given that Asano isn’t even your name, huh!” 

Gakuhou visibly flinches. “A- Ga-”

“What do you want to say? That you’re not obligated to tell me shit? Well I’m sorry to burst your bubble but you’re not king shit and you have to answer to people for your actions! In this fake life you’ve created, in this goddamn house, you have to answer to  _ me! _ You have a responsibility to me, but funny how it always seems like the only thing you know how to do is run away from your problems!” 

Naomi steps up, looking terrified. “Y-”

“Yeah I’m sorry,  _ auntie _ , but you don’t get to comment because you know NOTHING about my life.” Gakushuu turns back around, gives his father his best fuck-you-and-your-entire-lineage smile, and storms out.

He walks across the street and down a few blocks when he finally pauses to catch his breath, and he sits down at the side of the road. He’s angry not because of the nature of the secret, not really, he thinks. Parents really aren’t obligated to spill everything about their lives, and it must be hard to disclose the difficult truths when their children are younger. Ren himself only found out last year his mother had a miscarriage before him, Karma learnt three months ago that he was consummated out of wedlock and his parents had a shotgun marriage, and Seo had literally found out last week that his mother had dated his father’s brother before him.

Gakushuu was angry because they were supposed to be more honest with each other, and somehow every secret his father seemed to keep surmounted into a list of reasons why he chose to raise Gakushuu the way he did and this? Some tumultuous family background was just the icing on the cake, wasn’t it?

“Ughhh,” Gakushuu says, burying his face in his hands. He lays back on the sidewalk and tucks his feet towards him to keep them out of the road.

He gets ten minutes of blissful silence.

“You’re so aggravating.”

“Ughhh,” Gakushuu says. Someone sits down next to him, blocking the sun out from his eyes. He doesn’t need to lift his hands to know who it is. “I’m so mad at you.”

“I know.” A hand starts stroking his hair. Gakushuu’s mad at him.

“They’ve gone back to the hotel,” Gakuhou says. There’s a pause. “They’re staying here for the time being.”

“I didn’t buy enough groceries,” Gakushuu mumbles.

“Then go buy more.”

“Ughhh.”

There’s a longer silence this time, as Gakuhou continues quietly stroking Gakushu’s hair, and they’re in the middle of the street like a bunch of weirdos when their house was two minutes away. 

“I left a few years after I graduated, Harvard,” his father starts. “I wanted to be an educator. They didn’t see my vision, and they berated my unrealistic choices. I went into finance like they wanted me to, but I was impassioned. After I earned enough money for them to comfortably live out the rest of their lives and for me to start over, I packed up and left.”

Gakushuu lets out a long sigh. “Why Japan?”

“I could speak Japanese.”

Gakushuu snorts. 

“My mother was a Japanese immigrant to America,” he says. “So you’re only a quarter American.”

“How disappointing,” Gakushuu mutters wryly. “I’ve always dreamt of being half-American.”

“When Ikeda… it felt like I failed twice times over.”

Gakushuu peeks an eye out from between his fingers. His father is staring at him with an uncharacteristically soft look. “Thrice,” Gakushuu corrects.

“You are not my failure, Gakushuu Asano,” Gakuhou says. “You’re my biggest success.”

Gakushuu’s glad his hands are still on his face, because his cheeks burn. He tries to scowl. “Ew. Gross.” Then, “I can’t believe you got to choose your own damn name, and you named yourself  _ Gakuhou _ .”

His father does not have his hands over his face, which is why Gakushuu gets to see him blush brilliantly bright. “I-”

“And you named me  _ Gakushuu _ ,” he cringes, “when you started with such a normal name like  _ James _ \- James what?”

“James Smith.”

“James Smith! James mothefucking Smith! You might as well have been called John Doe! And you named us goddamn fucking  _ Gakuhou _ and  _ Gakushuu _ because what? It fit your goddamn educator’s aesthetic?!”

Gakushuu gets flicked in the forehead. “If you want to change your name-”

“Gakushuu Smith,” Gakushuu mumbles. 

“Ugh,” Gakuhou says.

Gakushuu looks up at his father, darkened silhouette against the sunlight. He barely knew this man, and now he feels like he knows him even less. “Did Mom ever know who you really are?”

Gakuhou pauses in his ministrations. He sounds almost guilty when he says no. 

“Would you ever have told me?” 

“If I’m being honest?” Gakuhou looks at him. “No.”

“So you were planning to just keep it to yourself forever,” Gakushuu says. “Never bringing it up again, just letting all that emotion fester and boil inside of you until it manifests in terrible, unhealthy ways that ends up,” Gakushuu lets his words trail off, but he jabs himself in his chest with his thumb.

“I never dissuaded you from doing what you wanted,” his father says softly.

Gakushuu actually laughs at that. “Me? I’ve never wanted to do anything in my life. Every single one of my goals centered around defeating you. I wanted to make you regret ever having a child."

Gakuhou frowns sadly at him. "Gakushuu."

"I still do," Gakushuu says. "I want you to regret ever thinking you could become a teacher. I think I wouldn't have been born otherwise, and forgive me for being a nihilistic member of generation Z but I wish I wasn't." 

Wordlessly, Gakuhou pulls him up from the ground into a sitting position, and then leans forward and kisses him on the top of his head. He's still allergic to the word sorry, but honestly Gakushuu wouldn't have believed him if he said so anyways. 

"By the way," Gakushuu says, "you owe me - even more than you did previously - because of the heart attack I got staring at your doppelganger outside the supermarket. My payment is any and all information about your childhood, the more embarrassing the better. I get to keep media documentation, and you will not prohibit the sharing in any way by manipulating your siblings. I will however allow exceptions for information they deem is too sensitive and has to come from you at your own time. "

Gakuhou scowls. "Exploit it while it lasts."

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact! This was written in 18 March, 2020! I realize I haven't posted in a really time and I was scouring through my old WIPs to look for something to put in my incomplete fic collection... then I came across this. I deliberated putting it as a chapter in the IFC, but I figured it looked complete enough to warrant a standalone. Just know that everything you read here is almost a whole year ago Gwen.
> 
> I remember distinctly almost, ALMOST completing this, but then my dear WhatTheFridgeDude wrote ["The Life of an Asano"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24985834) which was a gripping piece on Gakuhou's backstory that made me cry like a little baby and I was so blown away that I decided that I was never ever going to publish this because this mess of words did not deserve to exist on the same plane as that masterpiece.  
> Another reason was... Gakushuu is just way, way too OOC here HAHA Even though I normally write him with too much chaotic energy, I felt that this is too Too much.   
> But I'm here now so obviously I have no shame.


End file.
